Last Tuesday, Voss, Norway-native Jon Gjerde decided to strap himself to a gigantic kite and go zipping through the air like some sort of very ugly bird. The 51-year-old is no stranger to hang gliding. He is, in fact, a world champion in the sport. But after this particular outing he’s lucky to be alive.

Thousands of hours of footage were recorded on GoPros this year. Most of that was tedious documentation of your kid’s bunny slope ski runs and closes up of your ugly mug mouthing “is this thing on?” But then there were a few clips that remind us, hey, human beings can pull of some pretty insane stunts.

Sure, we have the X-Games and X-treme Cheese Nachosplosion Doritos now in our modern age, but the extreme skateboarders and snowboarders and parkourists and whomever aren't fit to boil parrafin for the extreme sportsmen of a century ago. Take these fellows here, who, as a 1912 copy of Popular Mechanics tells us, rode…